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There are movies you just watch, and then there are movies you simply surrender to. THE CAT is the latter. Lam Nai-Choi’s cult oddity barrels forward with a confidence that dares you to keep up: a goo-monster antagonist, body-possession, a tag-team of good-guy extraterrestrials… and, yes, a black cat who throws down like a stunt professional. It reads like a dare on paper and plays like a dare on screen, marrying Hong Kong action with creature-feature messiness and the elastic logic of pulp sci-fi. If that sounds like a lot, it is—and that excess is exactly the point.

This film explores topics and subject matter that may be incredibly difficult to watch and process. It’s not an easy watch, but it's a reality that feels true to the world. WEIGHTLESS finds tension in ordinary moments: a glance across a field, a joke that lands too sharply when you already feel too much. Set at a summer health camp bordered by forest and sea, the film follows fifteen-year-old Lea as she attempts to change her body and, more so, the way she inhabits her own life. That aim sounds simple; the execution is anything but. The camp’s routines—measured portions, group activities, quiet hours—promise control. What the program can’t regulate is attention, and the film understands that attention can be as intoxicating, as painful, and as formative as any number on a chart.

PRIDE & PRAYER is less about giving answers and more about daring to live inside the questions. In her debut feature-length documentary, Canadian-Kurdish filmmaker and performer Panta Mosleh turns the camera on herself, exploring the clash between two pillars of her identity: her Muslim faith and her queerness. The result is a deeply intimate film that offers no easy resolutions but instead presents a raw and ongoing negotiation of belonging. For anyone who has ever felt pulled in opposite directions by community, belief, and personal truth, this film will resonate deeply.

There’s a quality to DEAD OF WINTER that suits its title perfectly. Set in the frozen wilds of northern Minnesota, this thriller doesn’t waste time dressing its story in excess. Instead, it strips everything down to bare survival, the cold gnawing at both body and spirit, and places Emma Thompson at its center as a widow forced into a harrowing fight for another woman’s life. At once tense, emotional, and somewhat traditional, Brian Kirk’s film succeeds largely because of its lead’s presence and the unforgiving landscape she’s trapped within.

Some stories feel too far-fetched to be real, but COCAINE QUARTERBACK: SIGNAL-CALLER FOR THE CARTEL proves that truth can be more over the top than fiction. This three-part Prime Video documentary traces the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of Owen Hanson, a Southern California native whose trajectory from walk-on football player at USC to international drug trafficker reads like a cautionary parable about ambition, ego, and temptation.

DOLLY never lets the heart settle. It’s a grim fairytale, a film that treats survival as a messy rather than a triumphant montage. Rod Blackhurst leans into folk horror with the confidence of someone who knows the lineage—Grimms, New French Extremity, the scrappy terror of 70s American horror—and then pushes the tradition into something thornier and more personal. Macy is our core, but this is also the rare monster story that invites the audience to look directly at the mask and wonder what fragile human needs might be hiding underneath. The premise is brutally straightforward: a young woman is abducted by a monstrous figure who intends to “raise” her. The execution is anything but simple. The film’s sting comes from the way it frames captivity not just as restraint, but as emotional reprogramming—a ritual of forced dependency that echoes the most unsettling fairy tales.

SHAPE OF MOMO is a patient, deeply human drama that draws its strength from silence as much as from dialogue. Tribeny Rai, making her feature film debut, crafts a story that feels intimate yet expansive, grounded in the textures of Himalayan village life but resonating with universal questions of duty, independence, and identity. The film is rooted in the community, tradition, and expectation. Yet, it also carries an undercurrent of rebellion, pushing against the constraints that women often inherit when family and culture collide.

BODY BLOW doesn’t just resurrect the heyday of the erotic thriller — it rips it apart, drenches it in excess, and rebuilds it through a proudly queer lens. Dean Francis crafts a crime saga that feels nostalgic for the audacity of the 90s and radical in its refusal to trim its edges. The film declares itself a work of defiance: dirty, dangerous, and designed for audiences hungry for something riskier than what genre cinema typically allows.

The fourth entry swaps survival chaos for white-knuckle emotion. THE CONCORDE… AIRPORT ’79 isn’t shy about what it wants to be: a glossy, globe-trotting thriller that straps you into an icon of aviation and keeps yanking the yoke. The plot is simple and loud. A jet-setting TV reporter carries information that could expose a powerful ex-lover; he responds with sabotage, missiles, and one wildly public attempt after another to ensure the story never sees the light of day. It’s pulp in a tailored suit—lean on nuance, heavy on spectacle.

REDOUBT unfolds like a memory carved into stone, stark and inflexible, yet pulsating with a deep unease that never quite disappears. Director John Skoog has crafted a film that sits at the intersection of history and hallucination. In this story, a man’s compulsion to protect his community bleeds into obsession, blurring the line between vigilance and paranoia. Shot in black and white, the film captures not just an era’s atmosphere but the psychology of one individual whose life is bent under the weight of Cold War dread.

The documentary that you never knew you needed is here! There’s something inherently joyful about watching people surprise you, and SILVER SCREAMERS is built entirely around that feeling. The film takes what could have been a one-note gimmick—retirees making a horror short—and develops it into a celebration of creativity, resilience, and the unshakable urge to have fun, even when society has quietly suggested that playtime is over.

THE CURRENTS is a film that thrives on ambiguity. Milagros Mumenthaler’s latest feature resists the urge to explain itself, instead following a woman who is both at the peak of her professional success and at the edge of personal collapse. It’s a film about impulses—small ones that trigger tectonic shifts—and about how the past we try to bury finds its way back to the surface when we least expect it. The film is more a journey through time than a narrative construct; it’s about what life means to someone and the struggles they encounter.